That eureka moment
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`One of the nicest things about this book is that, like its hero, it seems to leave itself open to impulse... '
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ANITA DESAI'S The ZigZag Way stands out not only for the quality of its writing — "prepare to be dazzled by the glittering beauty of her haunting new novel" as the book's shout line says — but also because it has one of the most interesting, most endearing characters in a book.
Imagine a hero almost Forsterian in his receptivity to the (mystical) impulses flowing from the skies, waiting in the earth, in colour, sound and love, and add to this a dash of intellectual Salingerian pathos, and you have Eric.
Contrasting natures
Eric is impulsive and undecided; he lingers in conversations and meetings that add nothing to the sense of direction he is supposedly trying to work up under the "steadying" influence of girlfriend, Em.
These two are contrasts in human nature; Eric is all impulse, Em is the opposite; the first stands for disorder, the latter implies order and a kind of placid well being; Em goes after what she wants, Eric is taken over by sensed, seen and experienced longings and epiphanic moments.
They meet at university and move in together, Eric rather resignedly taking a grant to expand a thesis written on immigration patterns in Boston in the 1990s, which continues to not inspire him. Em progresses in her well-planned way with her medical research, which is now taking her to Yucatan and its forests teeming with mosquitoes and malaria.
Mexico strikes a strange chord in Eric, and in a typically Eric way he feels that it will inspire him. Em disapproves, but relents, though she does say, "Oh, Eric. I know what you'll do with yourself — stroll around and chat." She simply can't see what Eric means beyond that when he says that he has to wait for that "eureka" moment and "... that is what a writer does."
Of course Mexico inspires Eric, and being Eric, he abandons himself to it: "... distracted by everything — the kiosk displaying textiles bright with rainbow stripes and rainbow flowers, tequila bottles shaped like cacti, sweets made out of cacti and fruit, the hallway... "
Here in the heat, the dense colour, the haze of unreality that hangs over everything, an old, old memory comes to him of a grandfather who worked, like thousands of other Cornish men in the famed gold mines of Mexico. The decision to go in search of this ghost town, with only this ghost of a memory for clue and map is an inevitable one. This journey is Eric's "eureka": "... Now that he was following the trail of his own history, tunnelling his way back into his ancestry, and the history of his ancestors, he felt for the first time the urgency — and the terror — of knowing".
He discovers many things, about Mexico, about himself, about his relationship with Em; he also discovers what he had always felt to be real — that in the apparent disorder of lingering and being overwhelmed, there is that moment when some intangible truth about yourself or about the world fills you like a great wind. This wind steers Eric through time till the past touches him and bridges the continents of his childhood, showing him that the mystical core of Mexico is this very same truth.
This truth is not decisive, because it reveals to Eric that though in Mexico his lingering, his openness to impulse and his belief that there are "eureka" moments which have to be waited for, all make sense, he would still be out of place: " ...he considered the ... scenes from his life... but you couldn't hold together these disparate scenes, or meld them into a coherent whole. He mentally added a Mexican background... and yet, something would still be lacking. ... he could clearly see a gap, like a smudge... "
Open to impulse
One of the nicest things about this book, about the writing, is that like its hero, it seems to leave itself open to impulse and like him is taken over by Mexico's strange hazy stupor, part real, part imagined, part longed up and part induced. The narration is like a complex, heavy but still unearthly Mexican gold work; the language mimics the stuporous haze of Mexico, in which specificities of fact are abandoned for the detail of what is experienced.
The book, like the experience of Mexico, the mystical experience of peyote and the worship of the dead, concludes without concluding the action; we don't know what happens after. The moment of seeing that comes so lightly and washes over everything is allowed to recede so quietly that it prevents the effect of sweeping up, clearing out the haze. The illumination remains hazy, fumy, ethereal; it comes, it touches everybody and is gone and then "...everyone went streaming back to where they had come from."
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
The Zigzag Way, Anita Desai, Houghton Mifflin, 2004, p.176,$ 23.
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